12 #2
His eyes slid back to her. “Come on, Aura. Don’t be like that.”
The words made her flinch visibly, and now I wanted fucking answers. I could feel the truth rising toward the surface.
“Don’t say my name again, and maybe I won’t have to.”
Briggs leaned back in his chair, but his face had gone still. The table was starting to feel it too. There were too many triggers. Whatever this was, it wasn’t normal campus recognition or an old acquaintance being annoying. There was history in Maddox’s grin, and none of it was harmless.
Maddox looked around again, clearly enjoying the audience. “Round of tequila for the table. Pitcher of Pbr. And whatever she recommends, since apparently Aura knows how to serve now.”
My beer bottle stopped halfway to my mouth.
Aura’s lashes lowered once before she wrote down the order. “Tequila. Pbr. And a reminder that tipping thirty percent is smart when the statute of limitations hasn’t expired.” She looked directly at him, no bullshit left in her expression. “Maddox Vincent.”
Briggs made a strangled sound that might have been a laugh if the air hadn’t gone so tight.
Maddox smirked. “Still threatening men when you get cornered?”
Aura looked at him then, really looked at him. The polished customer-service layer burned away so fast it left only the blade underneath. “I don’t need to be cornered to threaten men, Maddox.”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice dropping but remaining loud enough for our table to hear. “I remember.”
The room narrowed, and Aura’s pen stopped moving.
My spine went rigid. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Every pair of eyes at the table shifted toward me.
Maddox blinked like he had forgotten I was sitting there. Then his gaze moved between Aura and me, and something cruel lit behind his eyes.
“Oh.” His grin sharpened. “You don’t know.”
Aura’s gaze cut toward mine for the first time all night. Not fully and not long enough to give me anything, but enough for me to see that she was terrified of whatever he was about to say.
My stomach dropped before I understood why.
“Drink order is in,” Aura said, already stepping back. “Hannah will bring it.”
Maddox’s voice followed her. “You really don’t have a type, huh? Hockey player now?”
Aura stopped as Maddox leaned back in his chair, comfortable in the damage because men like him always mistook discomfort for power.
“I mean, no judgment. You always did like attention.”
Briggs pushed his chair back an inch.
Rider’s hand came down against the table, flat and quiet.
Aura turned slowly. “Say that again.”
Maddox raised one shoulder. “What? I said no judgment.”
“No, you wanted attention. You have it.” She smiled, but it was dead at the edges. “Say it again.”
His eyes flicked around, catching the way people had begun watching, and some smarter instinct should have told him to shut up.
It didn’t.
“Come on. Everybody knows about you,” he said. “Everybody knew about that party too.”
The words went through her.
I watched it happen. I watched Aura, who could skin a man alive with nothing but tone, go perfectly, terribly still.
“Maddox,” she said, her voice low.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, laughing under his breath. “I’m not the one who made it public.”
Something inside me stopped breathing.
“What did you just say?” I asked.
Maddox looked at me, but he wasn’t smart enough to be afraid yet. “Man, I’m not trying to start shit.”
“Then stop talking,” Rider said.
Maddox ignored him because stupid men always confused being warned with being challenged. “I’m just saying, it was a whole thing back then. She knows.”
Aura’s face had gone smooth. Too smooth. The kind of smooth that wasn’t control. It was survival.
She looked at Maddox like he was a stain on the floor. “You were always a coward with an audience.”
His grin twitched. “And you were always real good at acting like the victim after getting exactly what you wanted.”
Briggs stood so quickly that his chair scraped hard enough to make heads turn.
“Sit down,” Rider said beneath his breath, but he was already half-standing too.
I didn’t move.
Not yet.
Because if I moved, I wasn’t sure the room would remain intact.
Aura’s hand tightened around the order pad. “Careful. I’m not as naive as I was at seventeen.”
Maddox laughed. “That word again. You used to say that a lot, didn’t you? Careful, stop, don’t, no. Then Darian would show everybody proof you weren’t as untouchable as you acted.”
My vision tunneled. “What proof?” I asked before looking at Aura. “What is he talking about?”
Aura’s eyes closed for half a second, and Maddox finally noticed my voice. Finally noticed the way I looked ready to rip his spine out through his throat. Finally noticed that my calm had gone lethal.
But he had already opened the door, and like most cowards, he decided the only way out was to make it worse by excusing his shit away.
Maddox swallowed, then tried to laugh like there was still a version of this where he walked away untouched.
“There was a video, okay?” he said. “Darian filmed it.”
The table went quiet in a way bars weren’t supposed to go quiet.
The Red Wings game still played over the speakers, people still laughed near the dartboards, and glasses still struck tables, but everything around me narrowed to Aura standing at the end of ours with an order pad in one hand and a tray tucked against her hip.
She didn’t move.
That was what scared me first.
Aura always moved. A shift of her weight.
A tilt of her chin. A slow blink that could make a man feel stupid for breathing too loudly.
Her body was language when her mouth was done cutting.
But she was so completely still now that it looked unnatural, like every part of her had locked itself down to keep something worse from spilling out.
Maddox’s eyes flicked toward her, then away.
Coward.
Even saying it, even dragging whatever this was into the middle of a crowded bar, he couldn’t hold her stare.
“It was a party,” he said, his voice thinner now. “People were drinking. Stuff happened.”
“What stuff?” I asked.
My voice did not sound like mine anymore.
Maddox lifted both hands. “Man, don’t make it weird.”
Briggs stood so fast his chair scraped hard against the floor.
Rider’s palm struck the table, flat and sharp. “Answer him.”
Maddox’s mouth tightened, and the ugly thing inside him came out mean because fear always made cowards crueler.
“We all took a turn fucking her that night,” he said, looking at me instead of her. “Darian filmed it, and yeah, it got passed around. People talked. That’s all.”
The room fell away from me.
They gang raped her.
There was no version of Aura Clarke who had chosen to fuck a room full of men while saying careful, stop, don’t, and no. No version of her who would have let Darian film it or pass it around. Maddox could call it fucking until his tongue rotted from the lie, but I knew her.
They raped her.
Aura’s face didn’t crumple. She didn’t gasp or do anything big enough for strangers to name. Her expression went blank, but her eyes changed, and the look in them hit me harder than any punch ever had.
Panic.
Real panic.
Not the sharp, polished survival she wore like armor. Panic, raw and exposed, broke through her so quickly she couldn’t hide all of it. Her eyes shot toward mine, wide and black and terrified, and for one fucked-up second, I saw exactly what she needed from me.
Stop him.
Not save me. Not fix it. Not ask questions.
Stop him from saying another word.
My hands curled against the table, every muscle in my body tightening until I felt my pulse in my teeth. I began to move, but Maddox kept talking, too stupid and too vile to realize he had just handed death a chair at our table.
“She acted like she didn’t know,” he said, his mouth curling as his gaze slid back toward Aura. “Like she was some victim after the fact. But come on, girls like Aura know exactly what they’re doing when they get a room full of guys worked up.”
Briggs made a low, dangerous sound beside me, and Rider said, “Holy fuck.”
Maddox looked around, gathering whatever attention he could scrape from the edges of the room. “I’m just saying what everybody said. She wasn’t exactly fighting it in the video.”
Aura’s order pad slipped from her fingers.
It struck the floor with a flat little smack that somehow cut through the noise of the entire bar.
The pen followed, bouncing once near her boot before rolling beneath the table.
Her tray tipped next and clattered against the floor, and that sound finally made people turn.
Heads lifted near the bar. Hannah looked over from the service well.
A football player halfway through laughing stopped with his mouth open.
Aura didn’t look at any of them.
She looked at me.
The panic was worse now. Fear cracked straight through the center of her face, and I hated myself for every second I had ever thought she was cold. She looked younger. Not weak, never weak, but cornered in a place she had clearly spent years making sure no one could drag her back into.
Maddox laughed beneath his breath. “See? Still dramatic as hell.”
Aura turned so fast her braids swung over one shoulder, and then she was gone, pushing through the gap between tables toward the back hall.
She didn’t walk. She fled.
There was no pretty word for it and no graceful way to dress it up. Aura dropped everything and ran because Maddox had ripped her open in front of half of KFU athletics and smiled while he did it.
The second she disappeared through the back hallway, something inside me broke clean, and I rose slowly.
Briggs’s hand came down against my forearm. “East.”
“Move.”
His grip tightened. “Think.”
“I am thinking.”
“No, you’re about to put him in the ground.”
I looked at Maddox.
He was standing now too, his chest puffed as if being surrounded made him brave. Two basketball players had risen beside him, but neither looked eager.
Smart.
At least someone at their table had a survival instinct.